The present invention relates generally to a vehicle having a body panel with an access feature located therein that provides a guide for accessing a vehicle component located behind the body panel.
Many automotive vehicles have components that are mounted behind various body panels. Some of these components may be difficult to access for purposes of repair or replacement. In many instances, this is not a significant concern since it may be typically only a small percentage of vehicles where the particular component will require repair or replacement. Moreover, the difficulty of accessing the particular component may be only minor. For others, however, it may be particularly difficult and require a significant amount of time to access and remove the particular component, which can significantly add to the repair cost for that component.
For example, many vehicles have fuel tanks mounted under the floor pan of the vehicle, with a fuel pump module mounted therein and accessible from the top of the fuel tank. For such vehicles, access to the fuel pump module for repair or replacement requires that the fuel tank be partially or fully removed from the vehicle. The removal of the fuel tank, in turn, may require that other vehicle components be removed in order to access the fuel tank—such as suspension and exhaust components. This may be particularly true for vehicles employing rear wheel drive and those employing saddle tanks. The significant amount of extra time required to remove the fuel tank and other components can add significantly to the cost of repairing or replacing a fuel pump module.
In order to avoid this cost and the complications associated with repairing such difficult to access components, some vehicle models include an access hole through the body panel in all of the vehicles, with a cover plate mounted over the hole during vehicle assembly in the plant. In this way, access for repair is simply a matter of removing the cover plate, which greatly simplifies the repair and accordingly minimizes for cost of the repair as well. But this approach incurs an up-front cost for every vehicle, even though the vast majority of these vehicles will never require access to the fuel pump module for purposes of repair or replacement.
Another option may be to design the fuel tank and fuel pump module so that the fuel pump module is more easily accessible for repair. But this may be cost prohibitive or impractical for certain vehicles given the particular location and packaging of the fuel tank in that vehicle.
It is desirable, therefore, to provide a means for relatively quickly and easily accessing a component mounted behind a vehicle body panel, such as a fuel module that is mounted under the vehicle underbody, while also avoiding the drawbacks of the prior art.